Remix Culture strikes again – Kanye-style

Producer-rapper-artist KanYe West unveiled his newest music video “All of the Lights” recently. KanYe is known for many reasons, his music videos included. This latest Hype Williams/KanYe collabo is visually stimulating with the artistic story-line, flashing fonts, and seizure-indusing visuals, but was it an original? Is the video sampled like much of his famous beats are?

Cut to, the Internets in an uproar claiming Kanye and Hype delibreately ripped Gaspar Noé‘s French film “Enter the Void“. This cult 2009 “psychedelic melodrama” is more known for its visuals than its acting, opening titles included.

The once thought original-use-of-text in the Kanye music video now seems like a blatant rip off of the opening flashy credits to the movie. Did Kanye or Hype give credit to the movie or it’s director? Unknown to me at Drempt, but we did our research.

MTV says that the music video pays homage to Noé, but I think if that were the case, Garpar Noé’s name would have flashed a few times, in homage.

NY Mag provides a frame-by-frame of that flashing text in the opening credits to “Enter the Void.”

The people of the Internet raising questions ask, “why wasn’t Gaspar Noé, or the film that inspired this concept, flashed in kanye West’s video if they flashed the names of all those involved with the song?”

I may not have heard of this movie, but interested film people definitely have. Even Quintin Tarantino names “Enter the Void” one of his favorite movies of 2010, and had this to say about it-

“Hands down best credit scene of the year … Maybe best credit scene of the decade. One of the greatest in cinema history.” ~QT

Hype, being the unbelievable director and visionary that he is, undoubtably is equally familiar with Noé’s work. This is only my 2¢, however.

In his own defense, @kanyewest stated via twitter, “Context is everything…something good taken out of context can become bad”.